By Say It In Red
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1212 ratings
The podcast currently has 57 episodes available.
How do I get to the convenience store from here? How does anyone get to a convenience store from anywhere? Where are you right now, and can I follow you for a while? I don't think I'm catching up even though I told you I was right behind you - I just didn't want you to worry or feel inconvenienced by my indecision. Hey, is it alright if we just sit here for a while? I think... yeah, even this much has worn me down this morning. Let me tell you about a game I played recently. A couple games, in fact.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss the Milk series of games, covering both Milk Inside a Bag of Milk (2020) and Milk outside a bag of Milk (2021) and the surreal horror of mundane daily struggles with mental health, common chores, and our attempts to form connections. The first game focuses on you, the player, entering your name just before an unnamed girl entreats you to help her go to the store and buy a bag of milk. You have dialogue options, sometimes ranging from soft comfort to abject cruelty and often landing in sarcastic needling territory. As you accompany this girl, she reveals some small details about her daily struggles with life, chores, and the way she sees the world. "I'll try being a visual novel protagonist!" she says, and thus her thoughts appear as narration for us to read, even if she can't necessarily give them coherent voice. Once you've successfully helped her buy a bag of milk, she returns home to see her mother, represented as a blank, hollow-eyed mask, who tells her to go directly to bed. The second game picks up right here, immediately upon the girl's return to home as we now see her mother as a massive, formless being with sprawling arms and tendrils who injects a thin, needle-like finger into our protagonist's arm. From there, we help our protagonist, now trying out her life as an Adventure Game protagonist, search for her stray thoughts which have turned into fireflies. She longs for sleep and dreaming, and at the end of the night your choices will determine the vision she sees when she closes her eyes.
This is, above all else, a game about plumbing the depths of your own mind, the ways we navigate society and life as we struggle with mental illness, the way we make sense of our pain and treatment, and the dreams we see when we can finally sleep.
As always, if you like our show and want to support us, please give us a rating and review on wherever you listen! You can also support us directly on Patreon at patreon.com/sayitinred. We don't advertise, so listener recommendations and word of mouth are the best way for new listeners to find us!
Content Warnings for this episode:
Our episode contains mentions and discussions of suicide, self-harm, online harassment, and forced injection.
August is not merely a month — it is an emotion. For some, the final month of Summer rings in its hottest days and the looming dread of a new school term. For others, it's a time steeped in nostalgia and the memories of summers' past. Perhaps your August is the feeling of bittersweet romance and the distant promise of your future. Perhaps, even, as the seasons turn you feel, more strongly than anything, a longing for 1992.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer, a 2022 remake of a game from thirty years prior and one of the very first dating sims to gain widespread popularity and acclaim. Playing as Takurou, an extremely horny high school senior in the final weeks of his last summer break, you find yourself wandering the city to find girls, talk to girls, flirt with girls, take girls on dates, and answer quiz questions about their outfits in exchange for cash prizes. There are no fewer than 14 girls for Takurou to pursue, five of whom are his classmates as the game's title suggests while the other nine are adult women Takurou meets around town. Even in this early entry to the genre, you can see dozens of themes, mechanics, tropes, innovations, and gags that are still common thirty years later. In fact, if you ever feel that you may have a new, fresh, and never-before-seen idea to inject into a dating sim... play Dōkyūsei first. There's a high chance that one of the original entries into the genre has already beat you to the punch.
As a heads up for listeners, Dōkyūsei: Bangin' Summer is an adult game and some routes feature explicit depictions of sexual assault and violence. We've included timestamps below for the sections where we discuss these events.
You can also play the game without the 18+ patch which excises a lot of this content, though we found that playing without the 18+ patch skips large sections of certain scenes, even those which are not H scenes along with some potential graphical bugs that are solved by applying the 18+ patch.
Content Warnings for this episode
Teacher/Student route discussion - 1:36:45 to 1:45:15
Discussion of Sexual Assault - 1:46:30 to 2:06:20
"The small coastal town where you'll be staying this weekend bears the cool sea air like a mantle. Your suite, the luxurious Victorian era Revival room in a traditional Western style hotel, overlooks the harbor and the steep, switchback mountain trails that flow into town like a ruddy stream. Breakfast is served an hour past dawn and free ornithology classes are held each afternoon with the proprietress. When you leave here, you will forget some things. Don't be afraid - this is what we wanted for you. It's not the end of something. It's the start of your next journey.
Everything has a Reason.
9.5/10 stars
minus 0.5 stars because the manager got drunk and proposed marriage to me?"
- Customer review of a certain mountaintop hotel.
This month, Runa and Sara join returning guest Raven to discuss SeaBed (2016), a richly woven tapestry of memory, grief, kindness, and healing. The story begins as the lively and spontaneous Takako enjoys a seaside vacation with her long-time girlfriend, serious and grounded Sachiko. Or perhaps it begins in elementary school, when Takako and Sachiko first meet. Or... did it start when Takako disappeared? Was that four years ago? Two years ago? SeaBed quickly immerses you in the world of these two women, joined quickly by Narasaki, a childhood friend of Sachiko's who studies disorders and conditions of the brain and memory. As Sachiko struggles to recall exactly what happened, Narasaki guides her through the landscape of her past with Takako and into the strange pathways of Sachiko's own perception and memory. Soon, Sachiko recalls that Takako didn't just go missing - she died. That's when the story shifts, and we begin to see things from Takako's perspective where she's recovering from a memory condition in a seaside sanatorium.
For listeners who haven't played SeaBed, we avoid talking about major spoilers up until 00:56:00 minutes, so if you want to listen that far and see what you think, we encourage you to listen along up to that point and then check out SeaBed for yourself!
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include some deep dives into The Executioner and Her Way of Life light novel series and you can find today's guest, Raven, on bonus episodes for Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a Umineko volume 1 restrospective, and an in-depth explainer about Riverdale.
Dear Listeners,
Like the inevitable woe of an ancient curse, Summer is upon us once more. We're awash in refreshing recipes for strawberry rhubarb shrub, homemade swamp coolers, and the perfect accompaniment for a day indoors during a rainstorm: Indie Visual Novels. With huge bundles such as the annual Queer Games Bundle on itch, you're bound to find something that speaks to the most particular desires of your heart. Today, we're once again inviting you to explore the delightful space of Indie Visual Novels, and we've even brought some of our dear Patrons along to help us tell you about no fewer than Thirteen Indie VNs today!
This episode is the third in our Indie Game Compilation Track series, in which Sara and Runa explore the depth and breadth of indie visual novels, covering games that might be too short for a full episode but still warrant our full attention and praise.
We want to not only showcase the amazing breadth of work coming from Indie developers but also talk about some of our favorite games, many of which touch on subjects, characters, and experiences we rarely get the chance to see in games from larger studios. You can find a list of each game we played below and we encourage you to play along with us, and go searching for other Indie visual novels as well!
In these Indie Game Compilation Track episodes, which we do at least twice each year, we want to highlight some of the incredible indie VNs we've played recently and get people excited about the things happening in Indie Visual Novel development spaces. You should check out all the games mentioned here, but more than that you should go look around, find and follow creators, and discover small indie games that you can love with all your heart.
Most of these games are free and if not, fairly cheap (though please tip the creators if you are able), and you can read most of them inside of an hour or two. In fact, we want YOU, dear listener, to pick at least one of these games to play after you listen, and then tell us about it!
Here's the full list of games we played, and games our Patrons told us about, along with more information on where you can find them:
Runa and Sara played...
Patron Submissions
If you should ever find yourself trapped in a time looping phenomenon, there are a few tried and true strategies you can employ to survive, maintain your grasp on reality, and single out the mastermind(s???) behind the loop. First: Stock up! The mastermind of this loop will not expect you to be well hydrated, full of electrolytes, and properly equipped for mountaineering. Second: Get to know your surroundings! You've got plenty of time to study up on the most minute details of local history and you never know what obscure newspaper clipping might give you a huge advantage. Finally: Just die. Die. Die until you find the key to your escape. It's that easy!
This month, Sara and Runa finish Raging Loop as they pick up with the third main route and read all the way through to the end (and a bit further)! Haruaki Fusaishi has learned about the people of Yasumizu, he's found himself entangled in romances with two of its citizens, he's died and survived as both an outsider and a participant of the feast of the Yomi-Purge, and now... he'll take on the role of a Wolf. Despite struggling to find a scenario in which everyone could survive the first night of the werewolf game, Haruaki immediately finds himself designated as a murderer who must lie, kill, manipulate, and betray the people he's come to know so well. Despite his experience with the game and his looping abilities, he finds himself cornered and quickly at his wit's end. The wolf's side, it seems, is not as powerful and privileged as it might first seem. Beyond even that, what awaits him at the end of the wolves' victory is something more terrible than he ever considered, and more catastrophic than anyone expected.
If you're playing along, for this first part we read all the way up to the acquisition of Key 16. This episode covers all the events up to that point, roughly the first two main Routes of the game with their brief tributaries, and our next episode coming out in May will cover the remainder of the game.
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, an expedition into the House of Leaves, and most recently: A brief history of Pretty Cure.
Content Warnings for this Episode:
Discussions of Genocide, Sexual Assault (including sexual assault of minors), and Native American Burial Ground tropes.
You are traveling alone on a dark highway late at night. Desperate for a place to rest your weary frame, and maybe a distraction from the terrible break-up that set you on this journey, you turn down a narrow mountain road. The pavement abruptly vanishes beneath you and a rock flies up pat your face - that's right, you're on a motorcycle. Really a bad position, if we're being honest. You search for a house light, a streetlamp, any sign of civilization at all, and then at last you see it:
The buffest deer you could ever imagine, keeping pace and locking eyes with you on this increasingly narrow trail. You can't help but feel that this deer somehow pities you as it scoffs and, finally ceasing its torment, bounds away into the treeline at your left. Of course, you couldn't have followed the deer up that steep hill even if you tried. This makes you feel a bit better about crashing down the ravine a moment later, though the menacing deer still stands out in your mind. Ah, if only I could loop through time, you think... then I could make that deer respect me. You are, unfortunately, now lying beside the mangled heap of your motorcycle at the bottom of a river. You are the protagonist of Raging Loop, and you are about to die (again).
This month, Sara and Runa start stripping apart Raging Loop (2015) and cozy up with the inhabitants of an eerie mountain village. In the venerable folk horror traditions of many stories of city travelers stumbling into rural areas with strange religious practices, and the venerable VN tradition of time looping until you figure out how to survive such a place, Raging Loop quickly pulls readers in with a pretty compelling premise. What if you were playing a game of Werewolf, for real, and also this game of Werewolf was the result of Divine Mandate? Our protagonist, Haruaki Fusaishi, appears at first as the exact Median of all Anime Guys but really quickly shows us that he's kind of a freak with a loose moral compass. He realizes quickly that he can loop through time, starting just before he arrives at the rural village of Yasumizu, and decides to use this knowledge to push people's buttons and figure out how they work. Meanwhile, people's corpses explode in grotesque heaps, some seem to get possessed, and each night the wolves kill someone else. Each day, then, the villagers gather together and decide who they think is a wolf and hang them. Despite his new ability to re-try events with the knowledge gained from his death, Haruaki has only found deeper mysteries and a great deal of pain. What, then, will help him escape this raging loop that keeps raising loups?
If you're playing along, for this first part we read all the way up to the acquisition of Key 16. This episode covers all the events up to that point, roughly the first two main Routes of the game with their brief tributaries, and our next episode coming out in May will cover the remainder of the game.
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, an expedition into the House of Leaves, and most recently: A brief history of Pretty Cure.
Editor's notes: Sara mentions that Raging Loop came out in 2017, which was the English release date while 2015 was the original release date. We also re-recorded a couple sections that had audio issues and we apologize if any of those are too noticeable!
Readers, Friends, Members of the Scientific Community! You, astute as you are, may recall a moment in the distant past in which Sara and Runa adamantly proclaimed that they would never cover Steins;Gate on the podcast - This memory which some of you may hold is LIVING PROOF of the phenomena which we will henceforth discuss in today's episode. You see, that was an alternate, parallel timeline in which we did not discuss Steins;Gate! Thanks to miracles no smaller than the manipulation of the flow of time itself, and also Sara's carefully curated Steins;Gate Abridged playlist, we have arrived at the present day, present timeline.
This month, Sara and Runa discuss the ins and outs, befores and afters, and the even the erstwhiles of the timeline hopping narrative of Steins;Gate (2009). As part of the Science Adventure series it shares some references to a previous Say it in Red subject: Chaos;Head Noah. In both games you can see characters grounded in the culture and various subcultures of specific regions of Tokyo (Shibuya for Chaos;Head and Akihabara in Steins;Gate) along with characters who engage with internet subcultures and message boards like 4Chan. Where Chaos;Head focused on the protagonist's dysfunction and delusions having an impact on reality itself, Steins;Gate focuses on a small group of university students who inadvertently create not one but two different forms of time travel. The first allows them to send text messages to people in the past, altering the conditions of reality in the present. The second allows them to send their own consciousness back through time to a previous date. Both of these methods rely on a microwave connected to a cell phone receiver.
As the club dabbles (and then fully plunges) into time travel and time alteration, our Protagonist Rintaro Okabe realizes that his dear childhood friend Mayuri seems doomed, perhaps even destined, to die no matter how they try to change the course of history. Throughout all of this, the genius girl who Rintaro is definitely not fond of and intimidated by, Kurisu Makise, is improving their time travel devices and discussing the theories, implications, and repercussions of their meddling with Time. In between all of this, they also find time to flirt while revealing themselves to each be nerds who spend a lot of time arguing about conspiracy theories on 4chan. In the end, however, Rintaro Okabe faces a profound dilemma, one that will force him to undo all of his work and truly consider the potential, and futility, of time travel.
For this episode, we followed a Steins;Gate Abridged playlist which Sara constructed - this playlist cuts out portions of the game, including sections which include significant and prolonged transphobia. We don't discuss that material in detail, but we do reference it as part of our discussions.
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, an exploration of Fantasy Romance webcomics and manwha tropes, and most recently: a lengthy expedition into the House of Leaves.
CORRECTIONS:
Runa sometimes does not notice when she mispeaks before an episode goes out. During this episode, when she meant to reference the creators of the Science Adventure series, or the specific writing for Science Adventure games, she sometimes attributed things to Nitroplus instead. To clarify, while Nitroplus was involved with these games, it's more accurate to attribute these things to the core creative staff specific to each game rather than Nitroplus as a whole.
Content Warnings for this episode:
00:51:30 to 53:00 - Discussion of a character route th
Good Morning Dear Readers, it's the wonderful day of February 29th, a day that only comes around once every four years! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation: Loopers, a kinetic novel developed by Key and written by Ryukisho07 of 07th Expansion! It's all about the wonderful day of August 1st, a day that only comes around once every four years! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation: Loopers, a kinetic novel developed by Key and written by Ryukisho07 of 07th Expansion! It's all about the wonderful day of August 1st, a day that only comes around once every 24 hours! On this rare occasion we wanted to bring you an equally rare creation:
This week, Sara and Runa enjoy the emotional ferris wheel ride of Loopers (2021), a Kinetic Novel devleoped by Key and written by Ryukishi07. The game centers around a group of teens and young adults who each fall into a phenomena known as The Spiral - a seemingly endless time loop fixed on the day of August 1st (year indeterminate). As a game that came out during the early stages of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it's no surprise that the characters' struggle to preserve their mental health and sense of reality might resonate with readers feeling as though they've lived the same day repeatedly during lockdowns. The Loopers group is led by Simon, a young man who is functionally now closer to middle-aged as he's repeated the day of August 1st for over 15 years, and his second-in-command Mia, a quiet and mysterious girl as well as the heroine of the story. They're joined by Kuro, Kai, Ritapon, Holly, and Leona before long. By the time our protagonist, Tyler, joins the spiral, however... Kuro and Kai have been killed repeatedly to force them into prolonged comas to prevent further self-harm, Leona placed herself in a coma to prevent her own psychotic break with reality, and the rest of the Loopers are in dire straits themselves. Tyler realizes that, since the greatest challenge of The Spiral is keeping yourself sane and grounded when all progress and growth is impossible, he needs to take drastic action. His solution, without hesitation, is geocache treasure hunting.
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, an exploration of Fantasy Romance webcomics and manwha tropes, and soon even a lengthy expedition into the House of Leaves.
Content Warnings for this episode:
Non-explicit references to self harm throughout this episode - we won't describe it, but please be aware that it comes up occasionally as a topic in the game.
You're on a narrow mountain path at the edge of dusk, on your way to a cabin that holds a captive princess. You might be confused or wary - Don't be. There's only one thing you have to do now: Continue down the narrow path, enter the cabin, pick up the knife, and listen to the voices on your podcast tell you what they think about killing the Princess locked in the basement.
This week, Sara and Runa descend the ever-shifting stairs and discuss Slay The Princess (2023), a visual novel dripping with stylized narration, artwork, and atmosphere about the allegedly simple task of stabbing a captive princess in the basement of an isolated cabin. It's a game that you can finish in either about five minutes or ten hours and the winding array of routes and paths afforded to players make it hard to predict just what kind of experience you'll have when you start a new playthrough. Will you ignore the voice of The Narrator, discard the knife, and imprison yourself beside the princess? Will you kill her outright before she can dissuade you? Will you regret your initial choice, seek to make amends, or even prostrate yourself at her feet and beg for her almighty grace? Will you fall in love? Will you escape?
Slay The Princess has a lot of depth for a fairly short and contained experience with an excellent sense of design. Despite some shortcomings and missed opportunities, Slay the Princess manages to convey a richly varied experience from player to player. With a single playthrough to the credits taking only about two hours, it's easy to pick up, easy to fall into, and easy to revisit to find each and every version of the Princess to see what she'll say and how she'll react. Take care, however, of what you see in the mirror and what mirrors you see in the world.
As always, if you enjoy our show please consider rating us and leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts! Our patreon (at patreon.com/sayitinred) also hosts a growing number of bonus episodes, released around the second week of each month. Our most recent episodes include a reflection on the 2008 Yuri Visual Novel Aoi Shiro, a full overview of Touhou and its many girls, and the harrowing arc of the Once Upon a Broken Heart novel series.
Content Warnings for this episode:
Throughout the episode, discussions of stabbing, murder, and imprisonment occur as part of discussion of the game's story.
Dear Listeners, have you ever struggled to see something out of the corner of your eye? Has a local legend ever stuck in your mind, not for its content but for its puzzling omissions? Have you looked behind your screen at the figure flitting away from the light? Never fear - many listeners have reported to us that they suffer from a lack of normasight, so today we're giving you twice what you need to make up for that deficit: A full Paranormasight episode!
This month, Sara and Runa hunt through dark city streets and over the ghosts of ancient waterways while discussing Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo (2023). The game begins as many ghost stories do, with a pair of young adults wandering through the site of a local legend just before midnight. Ah, before that though, the game begins with a Storyteller helpfully introducing us to the concepts of Color Television and Telephone booths! An incredibly helpful moment, especially as the storyteller instructs us on how to use the options menu which, against your expectations, turns out to be an absolutely necessary step to continue the game's narrative. Back in this empty playground, a young working professional man, one Shogo, talks to his friend and perhaps budding crush Yoko about a strange ritual mentioned in a magazine recently - the Rite of Resurrection. Is there truly magic which could resurrect the dead? And if so, then why is Yoko so insistent upon searching through the sites of local ghost stories and discussing their origins? As it happens, these nine ghost stories (The Seven Mysteries subtitle is an intentional misnomer) hold the key to the forbidden spell to revive dead souls... and soon after midnight, Shogo becomes obsessed with obtaining this power, even if it means killing the others around the city in pursuit of it.
Paranormasight combines some of our favorite visual novel tropes with some excellent character writing and solid aesthetic style to deliver a very competent and effective horror thriller, ghost story, and puzzle box narrative. We avoid major spoilers beyond a certain point in our episode, in order to preserve some of this mystery and to encourage our listeners to play as well, so don't worry if you haven't played the game just yet!
At the time this episode comes out, we'll be just a couple days away from 2024! Happy New Year, and thank you for supporting Say it in Red through these past twelve months. We've got a lot of exciting things in store for 2024, and you can find our schedule for upcoming releases up at patreon.com/sayitinred. As always, if you like the show please consider giving us a rating and writing a review on your podcast platform of choice, and thank you again for your support!
Content Warnings for this episode include:
Regular discussions of death by drowning, mentions of suicide, and some body horror.
The podcast currently has 57 episodes available.